Richard Gendal Brown, who i've never been fond of b/c of his misperceptions around Bitcoin, may be finally getting it:So, sure: bitcoin raises all kinds of conceptual, legal, technical and philosophical questions. But it would only take one of these scenarios to drive some adoption and, very quickly, bitcoin might cease to be a sideshow. And, given that its core design goal of censorship-resistant digital cash has such disruptive potential – good and bad, this possibility alone is reason to keep an eye on it. Dismissing it entirely could be a big mistake.

Happened for a few hours today as well. Japan, then Europe. Again though, someone stepped in.

This is really interesting. I think it goes back to a fundamental flaw in debt-based money, particularly when FRB means that 95% of a currency is not even government printed "fiat". The flaw is interest, specifically that debt-money which attracts interest is only sustainable long-term if real GDP grows faster than the real interest rate which debt-money requires to service it. Otherwise most money is drained from the productive economy and winds up at the banks where the only cleansing mechanism is bank insolvencies which returns money to the economy. Since bank insolvency is pretty much "banned" by CBs as banks are backstopped by printed money, then wealth transfers and economic distortions continue to build up relentlessly.

Equity-based money and asset alternatives (Gold, silver, real-estate, Picasso paintings) do not have this flaw, however, until Bitcoin was invented, none of them were suitable for 21st (or even 20th) Century long-distance, fast moving commerce.

Paradigm change. Your time is coming!

I think it's obvious of the implications of debt based economy if mismanaged.. Although long term it's impossible to manage due to greed and fear. The reason It was done was because economy simply would stagnate and not grow from the 70s on who knows if Internet would have been invented.. Although the system was the best at the time it's not one to look back on and say we totally failed. It's really interest rate targetting that is the foundation of the system and it's pretty sound according to John Nash although not ideal. Gold standard is less ideal howver Bitcoin seems to be better than both on paper.. In practice who knows. I personally believe nash purposely doesn't acknowldge it because he had a hand in designing it and it may be definition of what he calls ideal money. It would probably result in a big credit crunch lasting years before we prosper so it really depends on if enough people can be convinced of the long term solution giving up some short term pain.

Happened for a few hours today as well. Japan, then Europe. Again though, someone stepped in.

This is really interesting. I think it goes back to a fundamental flaw in debt-based money, particularly when FRB means that 95% of a currency is not even government printed "fiat". The flaw is interest, specifically that debt-money which attracts interest is only sustainable long-term if real GDP grows faster than the real interest rate which debt-money requires to service it. Otherwise most money is drained from the productive economy and winds up at the banks where the only cleansing mechanism is bank insolvencies which returns money to the economy. Since bank insolvency is pretty much "banned" by CBs as banks are backstopped by printed money, then wealth transfers and economic distortions continue to build up relentlessly.

You just described what happened in the 1920s and then 1930s. And on the first FED cycle they decided against allowing the cleansing mechanism to function, and instead choose monetary inflation.

Equity-based money and asset alternatives (Gold, silver, real-estate, Picasso paintings) do not have this flaw, however, until Bitcoin was invented, none of them were suitable for 21st (or even 20th) Century long-distance, fast moving commerce.

And that is why gold as money worked for so long. Yes there were cycles, but since money never extended too far beyond the base money (M0 gold), the busts were relatively small.

With debt money, as you said 95% of money in use isn't even printed yet, and on top of that is further leverage. This means that the bust would be massive and crushing in a manner that could never happen under a gold standard.

What the US traded was a series of small but easily recoverable busts that continuously cleansed out the system, for a system that appears stable but in reality is not, the series of small busts are simply being allowed to build into one massive bust.

What the US traded was a series of small but easily recoverable busts that continuously cleansed out the system, for a system that appears stable but in reality is not, the series of small busts are simply being allowed to build into one massive bust.

They exchange function for confidence, the real for the prettier illusion.

I suppose it is a risk... If you are running such a really long con, even your successors might fall for it.

I think it's obvious of the implications of debt based economy if mismanaged.. Although long term it's impossible to manage due to greed and fear. The reason It was done was because economy simply would stagnate and not grow from the 70s on who knows if Internet would have been invented.. Although the system was the best at the time it's not one to look back on and say we totally failed.

Perhaps it was the global roll-out of the telegraph from the 1870s which was the beginning of the end of the gold-standard. Long-distance commerce needed a monetary system which could play out at the same speed, and this transition was complete by 1971. So the debt-money system that resulted was the best that could be done.

It's really interest rate targetting that is the foundation of the system and it's pretty sound according to John Nash although not ideal. Gold standard is less ideal howver Bitcoin seems to be better than both on paper.. In practice who knows. I personally believe nash purposely doesn't acknowldge it because he had a hand in designing it and it may be definition of what he calls ideal money. It would probably result in a big credit crunch lasting years before we prosper so it really depends on if enough people can be convinced of the long term solution giving up some short term pain.

And this is what is failing because it has all but hit the zero-bound and staying there year after year: in the US, Eurosystem, Japan, UK and Switzerland - simultaneously. CBs are tinkering with ideas like negative rates, and want to restrict the use of physical cash to just small transactions, forcing people to stay in electronic money where negative rates might get traction. Desperate stuff. No wonder there are seismic cracks in the credit markets.

And that is why gold as money worked for so long. Yes there were cycles, but since money never extended too far beyond the base money (M0 gold), the busts were relatively small.

With debt money, as you said 95% of money in use isn't even printed yet, and on top of that is further leverage. This means that the bust would be massive and crushing in a manner that could never happen under a gold standard.

What the US traded was a series of small but easily recoverable busts that continuously cleansed out the system, for a system that appears stable but in reality is not, the series of small busts are simply being allowed to build into one massive bust.

Absolutely. However, governments are now such control freaks (unlike in 1907 when the crash then was considered more like a force of nature, and allowed to work itself out), that the one massive bust to come may well be met with one massive bout of money printing!

My thought is it appears to me to be pie-in-the-sky in sense of hoping that parties will avoid the increasing probability of failure as the compression rate increases. In short, the system will need be highly centralized in order to cope with that loss of entropy.

Regarding "compression rate increase" == "system will need be highly centralized". Successful compression rate increase is a function of the synchronization of node mempools, remember they are already all running the same software (consensus code), and receiving the same cascading p2p unconfirmed tx. They don't need to be centralized, they just need to avoid applying their own personal tx censorship rules (e.g. like Eligius who regards Counterparty tx as spam while encoding books is fine and dandy).

If all miners already have a copy of (nearly) all transactions and they only need to confirm that, then that is indeed very low entropy. For example it doesn't allow for any network disruption hiccups. When all-for-one-and-one-for-all (Communism, low entropy) have to agree on (nearly) everything then oligarchies naturally form into that power vacuum.

Again you are asking small miners to have connectivity, memory, and processing power to listen all transactions or trust a proxy (pool) to do it for them.

This worsens centralization egregiously when moving to micropayments scale.

Some have stated Bitcoin can never work for micropayments scale, so if that is not the goal, and if pools are an acceptable outcome, then this IBLT method probably suffices for scaling Bitcoin within that low entropy paradigm and the potential Sybil attacks on pools.

I guess it is because I am looking at this from the perspective of my (conceptual) solution which makes orthogonal what must be centralized from what can be decentralized, and thus achieves an overall provable decentralization (no Sybil attack possible, no low entropy power vacuum, transactions can't be unspent by orphaned chains, etc) and micropayments scaling.

Agreed IBLT can be shown to work in such a low entropy constraint (all-for-one and very limited headroom scaling), which was the point of my comment. Thus afaics, Rusty has not refuted my comment (don't know if he was trying to).

IBLT doesn't alleviate the advantage w.r.t. higher orphan rate for larger pools with better connectivity (if the smaller miner can't listen to all micropayment transactions any way) which ameliorates cypherdoc's retort against one of my threat vectors. Again if Bitcoin isn't going to scale, then fine you can use IBLT up to Visa scale perhaps. But realize Visa was for brick and mortar industrial age and we are headed towards millions and billions of transactions per second in the knowledge age.

Some of you mention side-chains, but it doesn't matter where you put the chain, you just have to solve the fundamental design issue else you've just sugarcoated more centralization (e.g. you'll end up with a few behemoths such as Coinbase, Circle, Paypal, Facebook, etc processing the micropayments offchain).

I suppose any way you head off into the maze, you will always end up back at my solution.

It is being promoted in the mass media because the global elite desire to have a non-anonymous global ledger of all transactions (except their own of course which will always be exempted) that can't scale without falling into their centralization lap. Seems to be an outcome that is occurring precisely as it was designed to by the DEEP STATE.

And the fanboys cheer for their own enslavement, similar to the dog which chases its tail and doesn't know why it hurts.

If it wasn't being promoted in the media and still growing exponentially and virally, then I would wet my pants.

Richard Gendal Brown, who i've never been fond of b/c of his misperceptions around Bitcoin, may be finally getting it:So, sure: bitcoin raises all kinds of conceptual, legal, technical and philosophical questions. But it would only take one of these scenarios to drive some adoption and, very quickly, bitcoin might cease to be a sideshow. And, given that its core design goal of censorship-resistant digital cash has such disruptive potential – good and bad, this possibility alone is reason to keep an eye on it. Dismissing it entirely could be a big mistake.

What the US traded was a series of small but easily recoverable busts that continuously cleansed out the system, for a system that appears stable but in reality is not, the series of small busts are simply being allowed to build into one massive bust.

They exchange function for confidence, the real for the prettier illusion.

I suppose it is a risk... If you are running such a really long con, even your successors might fall for it.

The problem is that the nanny-state psychology doesn't waterfall revert. This is why such centralized manipulation sometimes results in Dark Ages.

I am "gruff" because I see a very significant danger we are sliding into a Dark Age of NWO fascist totalitarianism with the masses fully conditioned to accept the slow burn eugenics paradigm.

Bitcoin seems to be doing its role to aid that outcome. As I said, I support Bitcoin because it can be conduit to a potential solution. But I want to remain frank about what I think Bitcoin's other impact will be.

That we and the elite both need Bitcoin, speaks to why it is succeeding. Anything that is more aligned to our true ideology and not aligned at all to the NWO outcome for Bitcoin is going to fought very hard by the current system.

P.S. apologies if my posts are depressing. I am realistic, optimist. Meaning I see the cup as half full when it is. But when it is empty, I call a spade a spade. I hope to present a half-full option soon that I can be inspired about...

P.S. apologies if my posts are depressing. I am realistic, optimist. Meaning I see the cup as half full when it is. But when it is empty, I call a spade a spade. I hope to present a half-full option soon that I can be inspired about...

To me they seem less depressing and more simply incomprehensible.You may well be a smart fellow with your eyes open, but these seem more http://www.godlikeproductions.com/ type messages. Not sure at all what you are saying other than that there are big bad powerful things to fear out there somewhere.

My thought is it appears to me to be pie-in-the-sky in sense of hoping that parties will avoid the increasing probability of failure as the compression rate increases. In short, the system will need be highly centralized in order to cope with that loss of entropy.

Regarding "compression rate increase" == "system will need be highly centralized". Successful compression rate increase is a function of the synchronization of node mempools, remember they are already all running the same software (consensus code), and receiving the same cascading p2p unconfirmed tx. They don't need to be centralized, they just need to avoid applying their own personal tx censorship rules (e.g. like Eligius who regards Counterparty tx as spam while encoding books is fine and dandy).

If all miners already have a copy of (nearly) all transactions and they only need to confirm that, then that is indeed very low entropy. For example it doesn't allow for any network disruption hiccups. When all-for-one-and-one-for-all (Communism, low entropy) have to agree on (nearly) everything then oligarchies naturally form into that power vacuum.

Again you are asking small miners to have connectivity, memory, and processing power to listen all transactions or trust a proxy (pool) to do it for them.

This worsens centralization egregiously when moving to micropayments scale.

Some have stated Bitcoin can never work for micropayments scale, so if that is not the goal, and if pools are an acceptable outcome, then this IBLT method probably suffices for scaling Bitcoin within that low entropy paradigm and the potential Sybil attacks on pools.

I guess it is because I am looking at this from the perspective of my (conceptual) solution which makes orthogonal what must be centralized from what can be decentralized, and thus achieves an overall provable decentralization (no Sybil attack possible, no low entropy power vacuum, transactions can't be unspent by orphaned chains, etc) and micropayments scaling.

Agreed IBLT can be shown to work in such a low entropy constraint (all-for-one and very limited headroom scaling), which was the point of my comment. Thus afaics, Rusty has not refuted my comment (don't know if he was trying to).

IBLT doesn't alleviate the advantage w.r.t. higher orphan rate for larger pools with better connectivity (if the smaller miner can't listen to all micropayment transactions any way) which ameliorates cypherdoc's retort against one of my threat vectors. Again if Bitcoin isn't going to scale, then fine you can use IBLT up to Visa scale perhaps. But realize Visa was for brick and mortar industrial age and we are headed towards millions and billions of transactions per second in the knowledge age.

Some of you mention side-chains, but it doesn't matter where you put the chain, you just have to solve the fundamental design issue else you've just sugarcoated more centralization (e.g. you'll end up with a few behemoths such as Coinbase, Circle, Paypal, Facebook, etc processing the micropayments offchain).

I suppose any way you head off into the maze, you will always end up back at my solution.

You can't come in here, criticize Bitcoin, tell us you have the solution, not tell us what it is, ask for $10K to tell us, vomit voluminously all over the thread mostly incoherently, tell us it doesn't involve blocks, and expect us to take you seriously.

Your theory is all gvts are in bed together with all the banks and big retailers and they are all going to Sybil attack us into a one world currency. Most of us have already thought about that. It's not likely.

Any altcoin of yours that excludes blocks had better be good because that is precisely what has made satoshi's Bitcoin possible.

Orthogonality is a system design property which guarantees that modifying the technical effect produced by a component of a system neither creates nor propagates side effects to other components of the system. Typically this is achieved through the separation of concerns and encapsulation, and it is essential for feasible and compact designs of complex systems. The emergent behavior of a system consisting of components should be controlled strictly by formal definitions of its logic and not by side effects resulting from poor integration, i.e., non-orthogonal design of modules and interfaces.

It is often interesting, it has been resisting but when it will go up aggressively, the US bubble game will be over.

Goldbugs make me want to vomit. Gold is a bystander and has no impact on the US bubble game. It will get interesting to me at $850. It will go high because of the general rush into private assets as the global sovereign debt collapse gets underway. But it is not the lever driving the default of the bubble. Sheesh maybe a $trillion market cap versus $250+ trillion in global net worth.

Cripes I remember arguing with you guys when Bitcoin was $600 the first time and saying it would go to $300. Then I said headed to $150 when it bounced the second time to $600. Now I say it is going below $150 and you again will think I am incorrect. How many times do I have to be correct before I get some respect?